#1 Chromatics - Kill For Love
(Italians Do It Better)
I have been waiting for this album for 6 years! I was a huge fan of their last album in 2007. Both Night Drive by Chromatics and Beat Box by Glass Candy made it into my top 50 that year. That was also the first year of the Amoeblog and my first top 50 for Amoeba. Glass Candy will have a new album out in 2013. But in 2012 we got a brilliant new album by Chromatics. These guys are from the beautiful town of Portland. They have been around for about a decade. But really became a different kind of band back in 2007. Another perfect album of dreamy electronic love songs. These songs are seriously breathtaking and they make it seem so easy. These guys can do no wrong and always manage to create exactly what I need from them.
Listen to "At Your Door" by Chromatics...

#2 DIIV - Oshin
(Captured Tracks)
The band formerly know as Dive is now called DIIV. This was another album that I was highly anticipating this year. Captured Tracks has done it again this year and released another group of amazing albums. They had two albums in my top ten last year and they have two more in my top ten this year. DIIV is Brooklyn based Zachary Cole Smith of the band Beach Fossils. I actually like this project more than Beach Fossils. DIIV is exactly what I have come to expect from this label. This is shoegaze and dreampop in the year 2012. It brings me right back to the early 90s. I never really wanted to leave that period of music. So I am happy to revisit if often.

For their latest release, Brooklyn duo Prince Rama invented 10 separate entities to sing pop songs to soundtrack the end of days. Prince Rama’s apocalyptic thing might be shticky, but it also serves to highlight how the Brooklyn duo’s second album represents the strongest statement yet of their inverted pop aesthetic. “Those Who Live for Love Will Live Forever” channels ’70s and ’80s schlock like “The Hussle” and “Physical” through an art-pop lens that ends with a tribal background and the girls shrieking “forever” until the floor falls beneath them. “No Way Back” resuscitates forgotten new wave pop groups like Shakespeare’s Sister and Strawberry Switchblade in its girlish pop ambition, but the sound of it finds kinship with outsider sounds like the lo-fi pop of Ariel Pink. The way Prince Rama blends simplicity, as on the bare-bones riffery “So Destroyed,” with otherness, as in that song’s exotic call and response, takes them farther than the album’s admittedly fun premise. Hopefully whoever or whatever finds Prince Rama’s Top Ten Hits of the End of the World jammed in someone’s tape deck after mankind is long gone thinks we were pretty cool ’cause of it.